Book Release: The Surrendered

The deceptively facile Chang-Rae Lee delivers a novelistic TKO

Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered (Riverhead) opens with the sentence, "The journey was nearly over." Riding atop a boxcar, huddling under a thin blanket with her doomed little brother and sister, is June Han, an 11-year-old Korean whose journey is, in fact, just beginning. She is only one of many orphans who populate this beautiful, riveting, piercingly haunting book. Epic in scope, the story opens in Korea in 1950, then goes back to Japanese- occupied Manchuria in 1934 and forward to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Italy in 1986. The settings and times are masterfully interwoven to form an elegant, disturbing inquiry into courage, love, loyalty, and mercy.

Most Popular

At the center of the story are three orphans: June and two Americans, Hector Brennan and Sylvie Tanner, who are both damaged by their pasts and blessed (or cursed) with almost mythic beauty, superhuman strength, and vast, unknowable mystery. These characters converge at a Korean orphanage shortly after the novel's opening scene; all three lives are dramatically and irrevocably changed by their confluence.

Although narrated in unpretentious, often conversational prose, this novel is terrifyingly violent, unrelentingly brutal, and shocking. Lee gives his characters horrific fates, has them grapple with staggering amounts of pain—internal and circumstantial, emotional and physical— and endows them all with the strengths necessary to face it. This careful, finely wrought balance of character and plot imbues the book with grace and hope in spite of its horrors.

Lee's one notable misstep occurs about threequarters of the way through, in 1986 New Jersey, when two highly sympathetic minor characters seem to be killed off merely for the sake of plot convenience and gratuitous pathos. Aside from this lapse, the book's considerable violence feels necessary, organic, and all too believable. This is a book to read in two or three long sittings, gulping pages, turning them as fast as possible to reach the perfect, inevitable ending.